This brief paragraph appeared in the obscure country
newspaper paper called the Seneca County Courier would change the
world:"MAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION
- A Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and
rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Fall, N.Y.,
on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current, commencing
at 10 O'clock A.M.
"During the first day, the meeting will be exclusively
for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are
invited to be present the second day, when Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia,
and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the Convention." And so the first successful
drive for women's human rights began with almost 300 women attending.
See the full text of the Declaration
of Sentiments adopted by the convention.

B. 07-14-1811, Clara Fisher - British-born U.S. actor. CF was
generally conceded to be the foremost actress of her time with an adoring
public that named babies, even steamships after her. The adoration and
following was much in the fashion of rock singer popularity today.

Emmeline
Pankhurst
being arrested and dragged
away by London police
during one of theVotes for Womandemonstrations

B. 07-14-1858, Emmeline Pankhurst, militant champion of British woman's
suffrage whose 40-year campaign achieved partial success in 1918 when
women over 30 were given the vote - and won complete success the year she
died, 1928. In 1903 she and daughter
Christabel formed the Women's Social and Political Union that became the
militant wing of the suffrage movement. A statue of her is near the Houses
of Parliament. She also was active in the reforms of the Married Women's
Property acts (1870-82) although not one of the leaders.The Pankhurst campaign
is brilliantly described in the book Shoulder to Shoulder based
on a BBS TV production, a real visual and information gem except it virtually
ignores the years spent by Millicent Fawcett and others of the woman's
suffrage movement who worked within the system.

B. 07-14-1862, Florence Bascom - U.S. geologist. FB was the first
woman to receive a Ph.D. degree from any U.S. university (John Hopkins)
and was instrumental in making Bryn Mawr a major center for geology as
its longtime, much revered professor. She was the first women to be elected
a fellow of the Geological Society of America. Her domestic partner Julia
Anna Gardner (b. 01-26-1882) was also a geologist who did important work
in economic geology and assisted in the strategic planning efforts of WWII.

B. 07-14-1868, Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell - English archaeologist
and author. In 1921 she headed the British group which chose Faisal
I the first king of the newly developed Iraq. GMB was the founder of the
national museum in Baghdad. She traveled in the Middle
East after graduating from Oxford University in 1888 and acted as a British
agent in Egypt during World War I.

B. 07-14-1916, Natalia Ginzburg - Italian writer who examined
the solitude and lonliness of women within a male-dominated family. Many
of her novels have been translated into English with her best known being
All Our Yesterdays.

B. 07-14-1923, Frances Lear, U.S. publisher of Lear Magazine
for "the woman who wasn't born yesterday." It failed as Madison
Avenue continued to boycott any feminist publications. It cost her $25
million of the estimated $100-112 million she received as a divorce settlement
from her partner-husband Norman Lear, producer of two of TV's biggest hits,
All in the Family and Maude, the latter based on Frances
Lear's life as a businesswoman and a feminist activist.

GILLIGAN, CAROL:"As
we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of
development that their experience informs, so we have come recently to
notice not only the silence of women but the difficulty in hearing what
they say when they speak.
"Yet in the different voice of women lies the
truth of an ethic of care, of the tie between relationship and responsibility,
and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.
"The failure to see the different reality of
women's lives and to hear the differences in their voices stems in part
from the assumption that there is a single mode of social experience and
interpretations."
-- Carol Gilligan, author of In A Different Voice, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982. (Gilligan is one of the major voices of the feminist
movement who has been overshadowed by the strident voices of the "new"
feminists but remains the basic, sane voice.)